Narratology And Unreliable Narration In The Diary Novel: The Butler’s Diary In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day.

الملخص

Studying the structural elements of fictional narratives is not limiting, but it is rather an invitation to read literary texts in a way that brings out their multiple meanings and connotations. One of the most ingenious narrative tropes is the diary novel in which the narrative is framed within multiple diary entries. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) is a modern classic that won the Booker Prize in garnered much attention among critics for its narrative techniques. It is a variation of the epistolary novel comprised of letters, but it is written in a form of a diary with entries of six days through which the story’s homodiegetic narrator travels along the British countryside to visit an old acquaintance. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to examine the function of the diary as a narrative technique, and how it establishes the unreliability of the butler in the novel.